But warmer. So very much warmer.

“Come again,” he growled at her, his face in the crook of her neck so his beard teased her skin. “Then we can get this shit started.”

And Sophie laughed, because she loved him, this impossible man who was nothing she’d ever told herself she’d wanted and everything she’d always craved. She loved him. She didn’t care if it was grief. If it was fleeting. They fit. His cock deep inside her, his fingers wrapped around hers at the tomb, her legs on either side of his and her chin on his shoulder on the back of his bike.

Like two fucked-up puzzle pieces that made one perfect whole, together.

Love was the only word that fit.

“Not kidding, babe,” Ajax muttered, darkly impatient. “Get your hands on that clit.”

Sophie obeyed him. She reached down between them as he moved her up and down on him, and she rubbed herself. It made lightning flash through her, jolting to her breasts and then doubling back in the clench of her pussy around his relentless, demanding cock. She was so wet and her clit ached and she almost couldn’t tell if she felt good or if she hurt and she wasn’t sure she cared either way.

Ajax did something different with his hips, one deep thrust and another, even harder, and she broke again. The orgasm swamped her, making her shudder so hard that she collapsed against him, her face in his neck and her arms looped around his wide shoulders, but barely holding on.

And Ajax laughed that filthy laugh that never failed to light a new fire in her, and this was no different. He laughed and then he rolled, still buried inside of her, pinning her down on the bed.

He levered himself up on his hands and he gazed down at her with that same haunting intensity stamped deep on his gorgeous face. That mouth of his was grim and beautiful and slightly damp in the triangle of his dark blond beard. His eyes were so blue they became the world.

Sophie held him deep inside of her, that massive cock of his hard and big despite how many times she’d already come and how wet she was. She clenched at him and his mouth shifted into that hard, delicious curve that she could feel like his teeth against her nipples.

He didn’t speak. He hauled her knees up, opening her wider, holding her where he wanted her. And he fucked her.

Long and slow and deep and hot.

He didn’t say all those things she was afraid to hear, no matter what she felt. He didn’t talk about property or patches. He didn’t call her his old lady or even his.

He didn’t have to say a word.

It was the way their gazes clung, tangled. The way he fucked her, raw and intense. And Sophie knew that for a man like Ajax, there was no making love. There was only this, and this was everything. It was the way he rocked into her, as if he owned her. It was the way she took him deep, the way they fit. It was the sound of their flesh in the heat they’d made around them, and that arrested, commanding gaze he never shifted from hers.

There was breath and sex and the two of them becoming one thing, forged in the fire that only danced here, and danced high.

And his name.

She chanted it like a spell. Like a song the voodoo priestesses sang for luck in the city’s dark corners, spinning the notes out into the night. She chanted it like magic, again and again, as he fucked into her and made them both real, made this real, made sex into promises and lust into vows.

Sophie didn’t know what he’d call it, but she knew it was love. Every inch. Every touch. Everything she was.

She chanted his name, and then she moaned it. And Ajax laughed in that way of his, as if he’d always known each and every contour of her soul the way he knew every fold of her pussy.

And this time, when she started shaking, when the wild, giddy, rough, and dirty pleasure burst wide open and swallowed her whole, she took him with her.

—

In the morning, Sophie felt like a stranger to herself. Made new, somehow. Fresh and fragile, and she didn’t know what to make of it.

Ajax checked his messages on his phone while she made them coffee, as if this was any random day in a life they shared, and she couldn’t let herself think about that. Not in the bright morning light that poured in the windows, illuminating everything that had seemed so simple in the dark. She thunked his mug down in front of him and he laughed at her attitude, hanging an arm around her hips and hauling her close to him while he lounged in his chair.

“You’ll suck my cock happily but serving me coffee is a problem for you?” he taunted her, some message droning in his ear. She could hear a tinny male voice in the distance. “Not gonna argue with your priorities, babe, but you know that doesn’t make any sense, right?”

“You want service, Ajax?” she asked sweetly, baring her teeth at him. “Get a maid.”

“How about you, dressed like a maid?” he countered, that lazy heat in his eyes. “I could make that work.”

She rolled her eyes, and opened her mouth to slap that back at him, but he went rigid. His expression shut down. His gaze shuttered and his mouth flattened into that hard line she remembered too well.

“What is it?” she asked when he put the phone down, and she knew it was a loaded question. Or a dangerous one.

Because last night was sex and love and that had been a gleaming truth. It still burned inside of her. But this was a brighter, harsher morning, and she’d stumbled up against another hard truth whether she liked it or not.

Life with a man like Ajax meant there would always be questions he wouldn’t answer. And she would simply have to live with it if she wanted to live with him, because it would never change. She’d spent twenty-eight years dealing with the repercussions of that already, but a father wasn’t the same thing as a lover. Could she handle that kind of wall in a man who was otherwise without boundaries?

Could she accept that the only place he would ever be utterly honest with her all of the time was in bed?

Sophie didn’t know. And she didn’t have to know, because he hadn’t asked her to make anything work with him in any long-term way anyway, no matter how she might feel.

And he didn’t tell her his phone call was none of her business now—which was delaying the facing of that question, she knew. Only delaying it.

“Had an old friend take a look at your dad’s accident report.” He shifted in his chair, pulling her down across his lap and holding her there, and she refused to make the fact he was holding her into some fantasy story. She refused.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m a nosy fucker,” Ajax said, his voice hard. “And because something about this didn’t sit right.”

“You mean, that he’s dead?” Sophie asked flatly. She cleared her throat. “It’s not supposed to sit right. It’s death. It sucks and there’s no escaping it and if there’s a point to any of it, it’s lost on me.”

A faint smile moved over his dangerous face, that hard-stamped curve to his mouth, and it was like a hard knock, deep inside her chest.

“I wasn’t looking for philosophy, babe,” he said quietly. “I was looking for answers.”

Sophie understood, looking down into those fiercely blue eyes of his, that she didn’t want to know what he’d found out. That she wanted the ignorance. The darkness. That there was a reason men like Ajax, and her father, and all the brothers just like them, built these walls between the different aspects of their lives and guarded them so carefully.

Because of this, right here. That look in his eyes, that terrible knowledge.

But Sophie still wasn’t a little bitch, much as she wanted to be one at the moment, if it would keep her safe. And she would never let her father down like that, not even about this.

“Did you get your answers?” she asked.

“The investigators say that Priest went straight when the road curved. No hesitation. The only way that happened was if he accelerated and aimed for a fucking tree. They can’t prove he killed himself, but that’s what they think, ’cause he sure as shit wasn’t drunk. First thing they checked.”